Prof. Richard Wolff - Crises of US Capitalism: Pandemic, Crash, and Secular Decline

hi everyone welcome to another event from the oxford economic society i'm gwan the president of our society due to covet restrictions all our events this term will be online here on facebook and not upload it to youtube afterwards if you missed the live broadcast just this wednesday we had professor michael ross talking to us about the predicament of major oil producing countries in light of the global transition away from fossil fuels today we have professor richard wolff professor of economics emeritus university of massachusetts amherst who will be talking to us about the crisis of u.s capitalism with looming social changes we'll be having a 45-minute presentation followed by 15 minutes of q a if you would like to submit questions for professor wolfe you use the pigeonhole link posted on the event page and the comments section of this video thank you for joining us today professor wolf and whenever you're ready thank you very much i am honored by the invitation of the oxford economic society to talk to you a little bit about the crisis of american capitalism so let me jump right in uh as you can probably tell by looking at my hair i am older than most of you i've been around a long time i was born in the united states i've lived here all my life and i've been a professor of economics i disagree with many of my colleagues in the sense that i'm a critic of capitalism and i meet with them a great deal because we share many interests those two are to my left those to my right and those in the middle and while we do not agree on how we got into the current situation and we do not agree on how to get out of it here is something we agreed to that surprises us and i think may interest you this is the worst condition of american capitalism in our lifetimes so let me let that sink in to you all what makes this bad economic situation even worse is the fact that the major response so far here in the united states and in many parts of the world is a denial of what i've just said an unwillingness to ask the questions to confront the reality i'm about to analyze with you so let's jump right in one of the starkest symptoms of the decline of american capitalism is the fact that in this moment when we have the worst covet 19 crisis of any country on this planet even though we are one of the richest countries on this planet even though we have an economic crash that is so bad that it takes us back to the last one like it which was the great depression of the 1930s despite that and despite the fact that we have internal problems of the most enormous size climate change racial antagonisms that are fundamental levels of inequality that are unsustainable socially despite all of that we were asked to choose between a donald trump and a joseph biden that choice under these circumstances is a symptom of decline and no amount of ideological dancing can get you around that fundamental reality but i'm going to be concrete here and talk in some detail with you about how and why the current crisis in this country whose details i assume many of you know from the radio and television and newspapers and so on why it is a crisis of capitalism so let me begin with covid 19. uh here is the reality the united states is an economy that has all the necessities to produce more than enough masks ventilators gloves hospital beds all of the things necessary to be prepared for a pandemic but the reality is we weren't we didn't produce even though we could have we didn't stockpile around the country although we could have uh the supplies of all of those necessities that would have enabled us to be prepared for this virus why did we not have the masks the gloves the ventilators what what's the problem the answer the short answer but also the correct answer is capitalism let me explain it is not profitable for a company that makes gloves or masks or ventilators it is not profitable to produce them to put them then in warehouses around the country located carefully where population exists to make sure that they are properly maintained secure kept clean replaced when they are damaged that is a very expensive proposition and there is no way to know when the next virus will come that will make these products assailable make people buy them so private capitalists don't produce them in other words it's the logic of profit-driven capitalism not to produce and to store and to maintain adequate supplies of gloves and masks and everything else so it's that's a real problem capitalism doesn't work in such a way as to prepare societies to protect public health which any adequate economic system should do as one of its top priorities for what i assume you understand as obvious reasons but we know what a solution would have been the government could have stepped in and the government for example our president trump could have made a declaration of the sort i just did private capitalism is not an adequate way to protect public health and then the government would have done the following it would go to the mask producers and say we will buy the masks from you as fast as you produce them pay you a price that brings you a reasonable profit do the same for hospital beds and ventilators and gloves and all the other paraphernalia and then at the public expense we will store them maintain them make them secure clean them repair them replace them all the things that need to be done because we the government know that viruses are a part of human nature if you're not familiar let me tell you all back in 1918 1919 and 1920 we had a viral pandemic quite like this one that killed almost 700 000 people so the united states is well aware of what viral pandemics can do more recently as i think you know we have had sars we have had mers we have had ebola the notion that we need to be prepared for dangerous viruses is well known and the failure of private capitalism to protect us is unfortunately less well known but how do i know that the government could have done this well let me explain to you the government here in the united states and elsewhere already does this but not in the area of public health here's where the government does it in the area of military production you see the same profit problem afflicts the producer of a missile or a machine gun or a fighter aircraft or a battle tank the problem is for the company how long do you have to store this thing before a war comes where somebody will buy it from you you have to maintain it in a warehouse you have to guard it and clean it and repair it and upkeep it etc and so it's not profitable you don't know how many years you'll have to wait for the war that will make it a saleable item so here's what the government does it comes in and buys the tank or the missile as fast as you produce it pays you for it gives you the profit and then the government at its expense maintains that military equipment so that the private capitalist doesn't have to private capitalism is no good at military defense and no good at public health i put aside for the moment why we have an economic system that fails in these two rather important areas of public life but they failed in this country and they failed badly and perhaps in your questions i can explain why the government did not do in the health field what it regularly does in the defense field let me turn now to why the government and the private sector have also failed to contain the virus here in this country a struggle developed between the scientific community the health community that wanted to take the usual steps the masking the social distancing all the other requirements of combating a viral pandemic versus the capitalist business community the capitalist business community discovered early on an old lesson of economics you can have a wonderful factory or office or store equipped with all the latest computers and full of all the raw materials you need but nothing will happen and you will earn zero profit you have to have the one absolutely essential crucial ingredient and that is labor human beings using their brains and muscles and the kovid pandemic deprived businesses of human beings because the shoppers and buyers were afraid to go in to the crowded stores and restaurants and the laborers were afraid to go in to the crowded workspaces and so the labor wasn't forthcoming and the business community suffered loss of profits so they put enormous pressure on our political leaders to open the country up to minimize or avoid lockdowns to minimize or avoid masks because they interfered and most of all the mask was a kind of constant reminder to everybody that we were in a dangerous place in relationship to this illness so the business community wanted not to respond in the ways that other countries did and the business community made use of the demonization of the government which is a way that capitalism survives in the united states it is always the fault of the government whatever goes wrong you may be fired by a capitalist but you're angry at the politician you may be pushed out of your home by the bank that lent you the money to buy your home but you're angry at the politician this is of course a wonderful arrangement for capitalists because it deflects the anger resulting from capitalist decisions on to the politicians who have at best a tangential relationship to those decisions and so we had over and over again starting with mr trump and particularly from the right wing in america the republican party opposition to masks opposition to social distancing opposition to lockdowns and so we did not take the steps that were taken in many other countries uh like the people's republic of china like new zealand like south korea like cuba countries with very different economic and political systems but who were able to support a government that mobilized resources public and private to deal with this problem having the government mobilize resources is not what american capitalism permits and it is now paying the price the covet disaster is worse in the united states than in any other country on this planet even though we are one of the richest countries we have one of the most developed medical care systems but we weren't prepared and our internal contradictions which is what they are prevented this disaster from playing itself out as it is doing literally as i speak with you when we are breaking new records every day in the number of people getting sick with kovid 19 and the number of people dying from covid 19. as if all that weren't enough we are at the same time going through a crash of the capitalist economic system now it is very popular to blame the crash on the virus but this is not correct it is not accurate and it is an important point to understand capitalism as a system began in england roughly in the 17th century and spread from there to become the global system you all know that during that time the system has crashed on average every four to seven years wherever in the world it has settled everything has been tried by the capitalist system to overcome to stop this instability that's built in and it was done because capitalists understood correctly that every time every four to seven years on average when you throw millions of people out of work and thousands of businesses collapse you are going to turn people against a system that works that way which is why they tried to overcome it you in england in britain excuse me you are credited with even developing a new economics john maynard keynes a whole new approach designed to deal with the great collapse of capitalism when he wrote his book the general theory in the depths of the 1930s however none of the efforts to this day none let me underscore it have been able to stop the instability of capitalism i'll give you a quick example from the united states we are 20 years into a new century in the spring of the year 2000 we had a crash of capitalism which we called after the trigger and in that case it was the high prices of dot-com corporations in the united states stock markets in 2008 we had the next crash also the trigger then were subprime mortgages so we call that the subprime mortgage crash of 2008 and here we are in the year 2020 and we have another crash which again we are calling after what triggered it the covid19 crash okay 20 years three crashes right on time every four to seven years calling it after the trigger is a desperate attempt of a capitalism that has failed to overcome its instability to try to blame its instability not on its own mechanisms but on some external fact like high tech high prices for uh dot com companies or failing mortgages or a viral pandemic we have had viral pandemics without crashes we have had high prices for stocks without crashes and we have had large defaults on mortgages without crashes what we in fact are going through in this country is the coincidence in time and place of a major capitalist crash and a major viral pandemic either of those problems would have been basic and threatening to the united states having them both at the same time is cataclysmic in terms of what it is doing and now let me develop the argument by giving you some idea of what it is doing in response to the covid situation we have seen a political division in the united states more sharply drawn more profound than most of us who watched these things had foreseen the desperation of the millions of americans threatened by this disease and threatened by the economic downturn has led a huge portion of them to move sharply and politically to the right to embrace right-wing thinking in a way they had not before to embrace right-wing solutions to social problems in a way they had not before it even means that as i'm speaking to you that part of the population refuses to accept the national election result that we had two weeks ago and there is no end in sight of that kind of thing uh and we will be paying the price of that disaster for years to come as to the economic crash we have relied chiefly on what is called monetary policy as pursued by our central bank which is the federal reserve it's called here we don't have like you do the bank of england and so forth we have the federal reserve for historical reasons it is our central bank and functions that way it has decided that the capitalist system of the united states is in such disarray in such awful conditions that it has to do extraordinary things let me drive this home we currently have roughly 22 million people unemployed okay uh that works out to 13 14 of our labor force if you add to that people who have stopped looking for work who are not normally counted in our unemployment numbers and you look for people who have part-time work but would rather have full-time work and you make the other usual adjustments our unemployment rate now is easily 20 or higher in other words we have worse unemployment than we had for virtually any year since the great depression of the 1930s uh huge portions of our business communities are closed and have been closed now for eight or nine months thriving cities like new york and san francisco are unrecognizable i live in new york city are unrecognizable compared to where they were a year ago and 10 years ago and 20 years ago so yes we are in dire circumstances the federal reserve has been carrying the task of keeping this economy from literally falling apart we are that close as a result here's what the federal reserve has done and it is not so different from what central banks in a number of countries like europe like japan and so on have done the central bank has created somewhere between it's hard to know exactly somewhere between 4 and 7 trillion dollars of new money pouring into the system by loans made by the bank to private banks by purchasing government securities of which there are many more because the treasury our government is borrowing record amounts of money the national debt of the united states is now larger than our annual output of goods and services our gdp which had not been the case before and finally the federal reserve has dropped interest rates to virtually zero just above zero which means every corporation in america every business large small media understands and it has now for most of this year that any problem it has any economic difficulty people who don't like the product a bad choice of technology conflict with your workers whatever the problem the easiest quickest and cheapest way to solve the problem is to go to the federal reserve and get your hands on some of that brand new money for which you will pay zero interest a free money solution that is why the american consumer but especially the american business community is now carrying more debt than at any time in the history of the united states much of that debt is companies issuing bonds that are then purchased by the federal reserve with the new money that they have created the simple way to say this is that the capitalist system of the united states is now totally on financial life support from the government as much as any very ill person could be put on life support in the way of supporting heart function or a lung function if you have a severe illness our capitalist system is barely this side of disintegrating i have never seen american capitalism this vulnerable and i understand what denial means i understand that what i'm trying to get across to you is hard to accept is hard to get your brain around and that therefore there are powerful psychological mechanisms that make you want to believe this isn't happening and certainly if you pay attention to mr trump and mr biden they will be important in helping you join them in pretending that this isn't happening but let me tell you where it's taking this society because we have 20 odd million people unemployed and so many of our businesses close the money being poured into the economy by our central bank by the federal reserve does not flow into hiring workers and producing goods and services because the demand for them isn't there the millions of unemployed can't buy the way they used to the businesses that are closed have no reason to buy the way they used to and consequently there's no point in expanding the supply when you know that the demand isn't there so where does the money go the answer is it's gone into the stock market people who play in the stock market banks insurance companies large corporations can borrow money at no cost without limit so what they have done is gone into the stock market buy shares in the hopes that somebody else two weeks or two months from now will do the same thing go borrow all that money at virtually no interest and buy those shares from them driving the price of shares up all that extra money has produced the inflation that people worry about when governments pump money in but it hasn't produced the inflation in the world of goods and services because that's not where the money went it has produced an inflation in the stock market because that is where the money went but this has enormous social consequences i'm going to mention to them two of them to you number one the 10 of americans who own 80 of the securities in the stock market have done very very well their portfolios their holdings of stock have been driven up by the federal reserve's monetary policy so at the same time that tens of millions of americans have a no job reduced income all kinds of burdens you these people are watching the top five to ten percent making out like the bandits they are in a system whose unfairness at this moment becomes overwhelming and hence the denial and the peculiar politics as this situation percolates just below the surface we are now a society with levels of inequality we have not seen for a century and this is in an economy the u.s capitalism that prided itself for most of the 20th century for being a capitalism that avoided extreme inequality that was the capitalism that the people could enjoy that created a mass middle class all of that ideological overlay is being ripped apart by the reality that makes it so different let me begin to draw this to a close by bringing in some of the other crises being made even worse by all that i have told you the footprint of the united states in the global economy is shrinking that's not new that's been going on for quite some time but it is beginning to have that famous transformation of a quantitative change into a qualitative change you know it's like when water gets colder and colder it's just cold water until it reaches 32 degrees fahrenheit when suddenly a qualitative change happens it's no longer a liquid it's now a solid it's ice well something comparable is happening as i speak with you the share of the united states in global gdp has been shrinking the share of the united states in global trade has been shrinking but it has now become a qualitative difference the prospect of other currencies replacing not entirely but partly the role of the dollar as the international currency that is now well underway russia and china for obvious reasons are pushing it but so are oil producers in the middle east so are all kinds of other social forces last week a free trade zone was announced in asia it includes 15 nations in asia including china japan south korea vietnam australia new zealand this is a not the united states not india this is an agreement to cut tariffs by a group of nations who together account for 30 of world output and trade nearly a third the united states is not the shaper the united states is not even a participant it's left out and in the immediate response of the center the political center in europe is deep alarm that what is likely going to happen they fear is that asia and the united states will work out an agreement at the expense of europe and they're asking whether the united states is going to go in a different direction and while they ask they are going to be making their own decisions and that includes great britain about what their future is because they cannot afford to be left out neither can the united states this sort of an agreement absent the united states would have been unthinkable as little as five years ago the footprint of the united states is shrinking the inability to bring to a successful conclusion the wars in afghanistan iraq libya syria yemen and i mean successful only from the standpoint of u.s foreign policy that's another sign the system is in very deep trouble then there are the problems that the american economy has created for itself by not solving certain basic economic requirements in a modern society let me give you just two or three examples we have an oppressed minority actually two that are now referred to as black and brown people african-americans latino americans by and large together they are a quarter or more of the population we're not talking small minorities we're talking huge minorities they have been uh given the short end of the stick economically they were badly hurt by the 2008 crash and they have been even further hurt if you're not familiar with it i could but i don't have the time give you statistics to show you that black and brown people are disproportionately getting the covet 19 virus they are disproportionate among the dead they are disproportionate in the support from the government they're not getting on and on the difference is they will not accept it the murder of george floyd the entire black lives matter movement you're seeing social demands for old problems that cannot be kicked down the road anymore and that is going to change this country it's already doing it black and brown people coming to the polls in much larger numbers in 2020 compared to 2016 is why joseph biden won and that has to be dealt with even though there's very little commentary so far because denial reaches far the economic crisis of the mass of people was alleviated over the last six or seven months by a number of federal and state rulings that allowed people and businesses to postpone paying rents for people it was a rent for your apartment where you live for commercial institutions it's what we call commercial rent what a store pays to the landlord of the shopping mall or the building where the store or the factory or the office is located most of these postponements will expire at the end of this year so that's in about five weeks from now those rents were not forgiven those rents were postponed which means when the the when the moratorium expires on the 31st of december multiple months of rent will be required of tens of millions of people who do not have the money cannot pay under no circumstances currently foreseeable and also many stores that have limped along will close now because they can also not afford the accumulated rent they have not been paying meanwhile the republicans and the democrats fighting out a battle of a society they still deny is in these situations postpone the provision of the massive amounts of help they need they too are frightened by how much money they've given to corporations and now they're confronted by economists like me explaining that's nothing to what you have to give to the mass of people if you're going to keep this economy from disintegration wow this is a society in deep deep distress and that distress is handled the way it usually is in capitalist societies rich people have the resources to evade some of these problems to postpone them to minimize them and to push the burden off on those with fewer resources poorer than them who have to live with it because they can't escape so people who are very wealthy if they're hurt can move to more modest department but the people who are already in a modest department become homeless which is increasing exponentially across this society in mr biden assuming he becomes the president you have somebody whose mantra politically has always been to get along in the american capitalist system by playing the role of political supporter of the 50 states in the united states the one with the most corporate friendly laws is the state of delaware from which mr biden is the senator he has been a partisan supporter of corporate capitalism all of his political life to expect him to do otherwise is unreasonable he campaigned as much against bernie sanders a socialist as against mr trump he assured the voters he was no socialist he assured the voters that what he hoped to do is go back to normal in the united states when he said that many of us gasped why because as i've tried to show you normal is what got us to this critical point going back to normal is getting back on a train speeding towards a brick wall you know what's going to happen because that train hit that wall already in the past you don't want to get back to normal my last point we've been here before in the united states back in the 1930s the great depression we did not have a viral pandemic at that time luckily but we had a population that suffered massive unemployment massive economic contraction but the reaction was fundamentally different we had our people our working class go to the left this time half of it went to the right and the other half doesn't know what to do and has no leadership but in the 1930s three organizations actually four emerged that hadn't existed on anything like this scale before and this history is how i will close first was a union organizing drive called the congress of industrial organizations the cio it organized millions of american workers into labor unions these are people who had never been in the union before whose parents had never been in a union before it was the greatest union organizing drive in the history of the united states we had never had anything like it before and we have never had anything like it since and people joined unions because they thought they could get through the horrors of the great depression better being part of a union than not being we also had two socialist parties which exploded in membership and one communist party which also exploded and the one communist party and the two socialist parties and the cio were the political backbone of the then president franklin roosevelt a democrat and they said to him basically you better do something for the millions of americans suffering in this depression and if you don't we gonna vote you out you won't be president all right said this politician who saw the writing on the wall and in short order in the middle of the 1930s when the government had no money because everybody was unemployed and couldn't pay taxes you know like today in the middle of that was created the social security system giving every american age 65 years of age or older a monthly check for the rest of their lives within a few weeks unemployment compensation from the federal government giving the tens of millions of unemployed a check a big one every week for an indefinite future number three the first minimum wage the country ever had number four a federal jobs program where the government came in and the president said if the private capitalist sector either cannot or will not give you a job i will and they gave 15 million americans jobs working for the federal government to give them a work to give them an income to make them able to keep their homes radical movement to the left with real concrete accomplishments roosevelt was re-elected three times he's the most popular president in the history of the united states no one has ever come close so the idea that a radical movement to the left is not politically possible is false it's refuted by american history had mr obama had the courage to do it he might have reaped the political gain that will now be forever out of his reach i urge you as young people outside the united states make no mistake the world as you inherited it with the dominant position of the united states is over it's not a question of whether it's only a question of how the decline of american capitalism plays itself out or to be a little stalker the question is who is that declining capitalism gonna take down with it thank you for your attention i'd be glad to respond to any questions or comments thank you so much professor wolf and we have about 15 minutes left so um anyone with any questions can submit those in the pigeonhole link but just to start off i would um ask like because you mentioned how capitalism hasn't been working so what do you think will be the system that replaces capitalism well in this country the debate has been constricted between what i take to be two kinds of capitalism a capitalism in which the majority of uh of goods and services are produced in private enterprises that are allowed pretty much to function on their own factories offices stores according to the preferences and decisions of the owners whether those be individuals or families or major shareholders and that has been distinguished differentiated from uh an alternative in which the government either comes in and heavily controls and regulates those enterprises or in in some cases replaces private enterprises with state-owned and operated and the name socialism has been given to the latter and the name capitalism has been given to the former let me before answering the question what the next system is let me tell you why i think this is a mistake if you go back in history you look at slavery or you look at feudalism the two major systems before capitalism in much of the world you will see that both of both of those systems exhibited both private examples and state examples that is you had private masters with their slaves and you had the government which had its own slaves nobody has ever thought to question that it was slavery because there was more or less private versus state slavery and the same with feudalism you had private feudal lords and you had governments both of whom had serfs but nobody i've ever heard suggested it wasn't feudalism because you had the state as well as the private in whatever combination i think the same applies to capitalism i don't find it interesting that some of it is private and others of it is either government regulated or government owned that that makes a difference to how society works but it has nothing to do for me with the question of a system i think capitalism is now exhausted i think it's exhausted private capitalism and i think state capitalism is similarly exhausted and for the same reasons that they have organized the production of goods and services into a non-viable arrangement namely a terribly small group of people at the top who make all the decisions the owners the boards of directors all those people they make the decisions at the top it's a tiny minority in every enterprise it's either a tiny minority of private individuals or it's a tiny minority of government officials and they decide what to produce how to produce where to produce and what to do with the profits that everybody helped to create i find this the antithesis of democracy so my answer to you is the next system will be the one that democratizes the enterprise that finally brings democracy to the workplace where it should have been for the last three or four centuries but it was exempted you know we got rid of kings and we substituted a more democratic way of deciding in society well turns out the kings didn't disappear they just moved into the executive suite and we now call them the ceo uh for me the alternative that people are finding their way too is a democratic enterprise after all adults spend most of their life at work five out of seven days in most cases the best hours of the day you are at work as an adult if democracy is a genuine value it ought to be in the workplace rather than exempting it from the workplace which for me is a disaster because of the decisions that private capitalists has driven our society to now which is what i tried to explain thank you another question from fraser would be that um what does union organization look like in the world of disaggregated labor and increasingly physically and ideological segregated work and workers well you know i would dispute the question only this way i think workers were different all along and heterogeneous i think the working class was always segmented it was segmented by national origin by education by age by gender by ethnicity i mean i could go on and you all know what i'm talking about it was always necessary if the working class was to get ahead to overcome not to deny not to disregard the differences but to overcome them and say yes we have differences of this kind you know you're catholic you're muslim you're whatever but we also have something in common which is our position in a capitalist system the job of trade union organizing has always been to foreground for people the shared identity of being an employee which we all share rather than an employer which is a tiny minority if you're successful at that without denying the relevance of gender or race or ethnicity or educational level i think you have the basis for a powerful labor movement that can be transnational and that confront can confront corporations uh much more effectively than they are doing now um another interesting question from lewis um is that marx is successfully replenishing the ranks in academia given what has happened the question is that happening here here in the united states um i think the answer is yes but much much more slowly than you might imagine um i'll give myself as an example um i'm a product of the elite education system of the united states i went to harvard then i went to stanford and i finished my education with a phd from yale that makes me something of a poster boy for elite education uh 10 years of my life i spent from beginning to end in those three institutions only during one semester out of the 20 semesters of my education during one semester over a two to three week period one professor at stanford assigned us the works of karl marx other than that none of my professors dared and that's all it was fear nothing else dared to discuss these issues give us the reading allow us to explore so i had 19 and a half semesters to learn micro and macro and econometrics and all the rest of it and the half of one semester i'll be generous to hear something like systemic criticism this is awful there's no justification for this intellectually there's none for it in terms of how the world is organized there's none in terms of how the discipline ought to be taught pure fear of what it would do to the career of my teachers kept them from learning or teaching anything we had to do it on our own i wish i could tell you that the crises of the 21st century the crash in 2000 the crash in 2008 or for that matter this one shook up or changed the mentality of the economics profession in the united states and that's all i can speak to but it hasn't are there a few individuals here and there who are opening up yeah of course i have much more faith in young people the new students they are asking the questions and they are learning that their teachers cannot answer them because you don't have the basis you don't have the background you haven't done the reading you haven't done the research you haven't gone to the meetings you're just you're not equipped and the students aren't stupid they can see it as we saw it we then went and learned it on our own my guess is that young people uh are doing that now but there are more of them and the glaring disconnect between the conventional micro and macro and the reality that students are living that is the key changer for what curricula in economics are going to be looking like in the years ahead um i think we have time for one last question um which is an anonymous question so it's international organized organizations backed by the us like world bank and the imf are not giving other countries around the world another choice except to sink deeper into the deadly system are these the ones sinking yes i think you're going to see tremendous pressure on the part of all debtors whether they are countries or individuals or businesses they cannot survive carrying the debts they have they can't survive at a time when interest rates are lower than they have ever been can you imagine what will happen to those countries in debt to those corporations in debt to those individuals in debt if and when interest rates are raised by central banks or by independent decisions in the financial world everybody here is wondering about that the level of debt is unprecedented as i said in my talk corporate debt is beyond anything we've seen in the united states government debt is beyond anything we have seen and private debt would have been except it is blocked by the level of unemployment you can't get it alone if you're unemployed etc etc uh and the level of burden rents that you have to pay coming down the road no one sees anything other than a mountain of debt which is in a way what mr trump's regime is dumping into the lack of mr biden hoping by the way that mr biden will have overwhelming difficulties with the disaster he's inherited which he will and then their hope that they can blame it on mr biden and then bring in the next trump in 2024. as i said to you in my talk this is the worst condition of american capitalism that i have seen in my life the center the dynamic growth of capitalism has left the united states if i wanted to be blunt in my speeches here i would say that capitalism has abandoned the united states it's gone to china it's gone to india it's gone to brazil it's gone to where the markets are growing and the wages are lower than they are in the united states there's no likely end of that process and so the hollowing out of the american capitalist system is well underway and much the same applies both in europe and in great britain i think that's all the time we have today thank you so much professor wolf and all of you for joining us here today just a quick reminder next tuesday we'll be having a talk by pranam badan professor at uc berkeley about universal basic income for poor countries in a post-pandemic world thank you professor wolf and all of you for your time and we'll see you next week thank you as well

Channel: Oxford Economics Society

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Keywords: Oxford, Economics, Society, Oxford Economics Society, Prof Richard Wolff, Crises of US Capitalism, Pandemic, Crash, Secular Decline

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Length: 59min 12sec (3552 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020